Jay Hammond, ‘Speaking Of Opium: Discursive Formations in Empire’. M.A. Thesis Dissertation (Columbia University Department of Anthropology, May 2011).
This thesis traces the social life of opium starting from the history of British colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on to settler colonialism in the United States (with frequent comparisons to Australia) at the turn of the twentieth century. This thesis has two aims. The first is to examine the ways in which discourses of crime, ownership and addiction – as manifest through intellectual property law, drug law, addiction therapies and advertising techniques – work to constitute opium as new objects such as oxycodone, heroin, morphine or Native American “Sagwas.” This is a gesture toward a counter history of these objects that challenges the notion that their differences from pure opium are merely on the basis of their chemical profiles. Through an unpacking of the discursive formations that work to constitute these objects in the United States, one discovers the ways in which they rely on the social formations of settler colonialism such as the logic of elimination. The second aim is to analyze the ways in which these discourses of crime, ownership and addiction in the United States were influenced by the historical foundations of eighteenth and nineteenth century British Colonialism. For example, while the “Indian medicine shows” of the turn of the twentieth century operated within a settler paradigm of elimination through cultural absorption and appropriation, they also relied on the opium that had been appropriated from India by the British a century before. This approach lays important groundwork for beginning to think the history of settler colonialism in the United States as situated within a dialectic relationship with the history of British colonialism.
Sounds like a fascinating entry point into an analysis of settler colonialism. To email the author, click here.
Filed under: Australia, Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Science, United States | Closed
This article explains the cultural construction of Kenya Colony. It does so by combining two related histories – those of international tourism and of colonial rule – and two key explanatory themes – those of crisis and of commodity. The cultural construction of the colony, the article argues, emerged from two decisive moments: the “Indian crisis” of the early 1920s and the Mau Mau Emergency of the 1950s. Its content, meanwhile, was determined by its creation as a product, to be constituted, marketed, purchased and consumed. Colonial decline coincided with the emergence of Kenya Colony as global brand. Whilst the political project to maintain white man’s country failed, the commercial project – to market white man’s country as a commodity – succeeded emphatically. Attending to political crisis and cultural construction together, moreover, illustrates the function of the Kenya myth. The myth of Kenya Colony, the article argues, operated through recursive tropes of the picturesque, the transcendent and the primeval that are manifest not only in the writings of colonials themselves but also in accounts of Kenya produced in the period after independence. By examining the post-colonial period alongside the formative years of colonial rule, the extent to which ideas about Kenya circulating in the world today should be thought of in neo-colonial terms becomes apparent.
Filed under: Africa, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This short paper analyzes American history from the modern “wars” on poverty, drugs, and terror from the perspective of American Indians and Indian tribes. These domestic “wars” are aptly named (it turns out), as the United States often blindly pursues broad policy goals without input from tribal interests, and without consideration to the impacts on Indians and tribes. With the possible exception of the “war on poverty,” these domestic wars sweep aside tribal rights, rights that are frequently in conflict with the overarching federal policy goals.
This essay explores three declared domestic wars, and their impacts on American Indian tribes and individual Indians, in loose chronological order, starting with the war on poverty. As Part 1 demonstrates, the Johnson Administration’s Great Society programs helped to bring American Indian policy out of the dark ages of the era of termination, in which Congress had declared that national policy would be to terminate the trust relationship. Part 2 describes the war on drugs, declared by the Reagan Administration, which had unusually stark impacts on reservation communities both in terms of law enforcement, but also on American Indian religious freedom. Part 3 examines the ongoing war on terror, which Bush Administration officials opined has its legal justification grounded in part on the Indian wars of the 19th century. The war on terror marks America’s return to fighting a new Indian war, where the adversary is illusive and motivated, and where the rule of law is literally obliterated.
Filed under: law, Political developments, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This article addresses the role of time as a locus of power and resistance in the context of 19th-century European colonialism. It adopts the case-study of the British settler-colony of Victoria, Australia, to illustrate the manner in which colonization entailed, as well as territorial conquest, the subversion of conflicting attitudes to time. It is argued that whilst the colonization of ‘Aboriginal time’ aided the broader economic interests of settler-colonialism by helping to absorb the Indigenous presence within the temporal landscape of colonial society, time also functioned as a tool for Indigenous resistance and cultural negotiation.
Filed under: Australia, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This paper situates the British Columbia Treaty Process within a brief discussion of the role of land in genocidal processes and transitional justice. It does so as a means to highlight the potential destructiveness of colonial land appropriation and the dangers of transitional justice processes that seek to forcibly transpose onto Indigenous persons the dispositions and practices of European property regimes.
KEYWORDS: Treaty making; land; transitional justice; transposition; genocide
Filed under: Canada, Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
This article traces the history of a series of “freedom suits” brought by Virginia slaves between 1772 and 1806, in which the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia judicially abolished nearly two centuries of American Indian slavery in the colony by ruling that slaves who could prove maternal descent from Native Americans were prima facie free. Delving first into the legal history of Indian slavery in colonial America, it then examines the doctrinal shift that led the courts to redefine natives as unfit subjects for enslavement, and argues that its roots lie in a racialization of slavery that separated Africans from Natives. The final section explores the national legacy of these rulings, tracing the spread of these legal principles throughout the antebellum United States and discussing how the racial ideology that divided Native Americans and African-Americans continues to pose legal hurdles in contemporary Indian law cases involving tribal recognition and the Cherokee freedmen.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
In 1773, with the empire on the brink of revolt, the Privy Council gave the final ruling in the case of the Mohegan Indians versus the colony of Connecticut. Thus ended what one eighteenth-century lawyer called “the greatest cause that ever was heard at the Council Board.” After a decades-long battle for their rights, involving several appeals to the Crown, three royal commissions, and the highest court in the empire, the Mohegans’ case against Connecticut was dismissed. The dispute centered on a large tract of land (~20,000 acres) in southeastern Connecticut, which, the Mohegans claimed, the colony had reserved for them in the late seventeenth century. Concerned that the colony had violated its agreements, the Mohegans, aided by powerful colonists with a pecuniary interest in this tract of land, appealed to the Crown for redress. As a result of this appeal, what had been a narrow dispute over land became part of a larger conflict between the Crown, the colony, and the tribe over property and autonomy in the empire.
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
From Business Day:
RURAL Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti plans to ask the Cabinet to permit more land claims by black South Africans who lost their property before 1913.
Legislation providing for land claims, which has cost the fiscus billions of rand, had as a cut-off date for restitution the promulgation of the 1913 Land Act, which removed the right of black South Africans to own land in more than 80% of the country.
The procedurally complex claims process is administered by the Land Claims Commission, which has battled for years to verify the authenticity of claims.
It has largely benefited those forcefully removed by apartheid laws from urban areas, rather than rural communities, and stunted investment in agricultural development due to fear of land being expropriated by the state.
The restitution of claimants is a separate programme from the government’s drive to redistribute farmland to black South Africans through the “willing seller, willing buyer” policy.
[…]
Mtobeli Mxotwa, spokesman for Mr Nkwinti, said if land claims were reopened, they could be extended to periods before 1913 and might require a further three years to finalise.
From Fin24 (SAPA):
The government on Tuesday denied a report that it intended reopening the claims process to compensate families who were moved from their land
The SABC reported that the process would be reopened to include those who had missed earlier deadlines and those whose ancestors were uprooted before 1913.
Rural development and land reform department spokesperson Mtobeli Mxotwa said the government received a proposal from claimants on Monday asking that the process be reopened.
However, the proposal, made to Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti, would have to be referred to the Cabinet and the president before it could be considered by the government, he said.
Filed under: law, Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
[T]here is useful material in the first half of this book even if you are not a specialist of Sardinia or the Mediterranean in general. This is not, then, just another anthropological “case study” of a place most of us will never visit. The volume speaks to wider issues that are of concern globally (conservation) and to regional issues (park establishment) as well. The comparative material drawn from African, Australian, Canadian, Latin American, and western U.S. contexts is well used by the author in her arguments. The material is useful for readers, and for the author, since she is arguing that environmentalism is a peculiar kind of global project that reflects culturally rooted views on nature and, yes, “wilderness” (p. 60).
[…]
While the ethnographic material found in Wild Sardinia is exemplary, there is a rather taxing and repetitive use of the subtitle (“global dreamtimes of environmentalism”) that becomes a tiring mantra. While this rhetorical wordplay is meant to echo (Australian) Aboriginal notions of space and time in a meaningful and playful way, to refer to how environmental groups spin indigenous identity to their own organizational needs and biases, the repetition of the phrase does little to drive the otherwise important arguments made by Heatherington. This does not diminish the importance of the author’s work. Critically circling around the concept of “indigeneity,” she is able to display the inherent local tensions of claiming both “indigenous” status and the local recognition that shepherding is a continuing practice. Pitching these as a combination of (Old) American West motifs, the “Indian and the cowboy,” and drawing on local vignettes that use exactly this language, Heatherington carefully portrays this paradox as stuck in a double bind. Are Sardinians usefully deploying a language of authenticity, of local indigeneity, that serves their purposes? Or are they falling into the very image crafted for them by conservation groups that depict livestock graziers as despoilers of the environment?
more about the book from the publishers:
Shared concern for nature can be a way of transcending national, ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries, yet conservation efforts often pit the interests of historically rooted or indigenous peoples against the state and international environmental organizations, eroding local autonomy while “saving” rural land for animals and tourists. Wild Sardinia’s examination of the cultural politics around nature conservation and the traditional Commons on an Italian island illustrates the complexities of environmental stewardship. Long known as the home of fiercely independent shepherds (often typecast as rustics, bandits, or eco-vandals), as well as wild mouflon sheep, magnificent eagles, and rare old oak forests, the town of Orgosolo has for several decades received notoriety through local opposition to Gennargentu National Park.
Interweaving rich ethnographic description of highland central Sardinia with analysis grounded in political ecology and reflexive cultural critique, Wild Sardinia illuminates the ambivalent and open-ended meanings of many Sardinians’ acts and memories of “resistance” to environmental projects. This groundbreaking case study of the tension between living cultural landscapes and the emerging ecological imaginaries envisioned through policy discourses and new media – the “global dreamtimes of environmentalism” – has relevance far beyond its Mediterranean locale.
Filed under: Europe, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Following the internationalisation of the indigenous rights movement, a growing number of African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and other communities have adopted indigenousness in claiming special legal protection. Their legal claims as the indigenous peoples of Africa are backed by many international actors such as indigenous rights activists, donors and scholars. However, indigenous identification is resisted by many African governments, some community members and some anthropologists. Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda explores the sources of indigenous identification in Africa and its legal and political implications. Noting the limitations of systematic and discursive, as opposed to activist, studies, it questions the appropriateness of this framework in efforts aimed at empowering claimant communities in inherently multiethnic African countries and adopts an interdisciplinary approach in order to capture the indigenous rights phenomenon in Africa.
Keywords » Africa – Human Rights Law – Indigeousness identification – Minorities
Filed under: Africa, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
